India News: Equal rights for women.

Ground Realities

Women . . . an endangered species

Photo: amdadul huq / drik newsSyed Badrul Ahsan

Fazlul Haq Amini has just hurled humiliation at millions of Bengali women. He has, in unabashed manner and without batting an eyelid, made the dire prediction that if the government goes ahead with its policy on ensuring equal rights for women, there will be a deluge of illegitimate children all across the country. It is something which puts all of us to shame, for no other reason than that in this free country there are elements like Amini to insult women in public and yet get away with it.

Women's organisations ought to have taken steps to have this cleric hauled to court; the government on its own should have filed charges of defamation against the man. That he remains on the loose, that he calls a hartal in "defence" of the Quran and Sunnah, that he and his kind deliberately distort Islam to suit their parochial purposes demeans us all. And it certainly degrades all the women of Bangladesh.

Amini's audacity is but one more hint of the threats Bengali women are these days exposed to. If there is one endangered species in this country, it is our mothers, our sisters and our wives. And yet we do little to ensure that these women, by any standard of modernity and under any terms of civility, are accorded the rights and dignity they are entitled to under the laws of nature.

You think back on the rape and various other degrees of molestation of Bengali women -- two hundred thousand of them -- by the Islam-defending soldiers of the Pakistan army in 1971. The War of Liberation was a time of unmitigated danger for all of us in this country but especially so for our women. They paid a price. Which begs the question: have they stopped paying the price, finally?

For an answer, reflect if you will on the misogyny which has taken increasing hold of large swathes of our population. One of the first things the killers of August 1975 did was to make sure that Bengali women could not wear their clothes in the way they preferred to. Sleeveless blouses and any sign of a revealed midriff were what they went after. If you were around the Farmgate area in mid August 1975, you would recall the frenzy with which junior military officers went about harassing women in the name of "restoring" feminine purity.

Things have not changed much since those days of darkness. There are all the semi-skilled preachers in villages and towns whose sermons on faith all too often come to be focused on all those physical attributes of their being that women should be keeping concealed. That is blasphemy. Meanwhile, faith flies out the window, whistling through the palm leaves and across the fields of ripened paddy.

Our attitude to women remains one of inexplicable discrimination. And nowhere is it more manifest than in the matter of a distribution of parental property. Consider this: when Amini and his men oppose the policy on women's development, are they not really worried at the prospect of women coming by rights to property that can no longer be ignored?

On a general level, despite the law and despite all the Islamic pronouncements on a sharing of property, how many men are there who actually feel thrilled at giving their women relatives their due? Yes, empowerment of women is a fine idea. But when empowerment comes to mean forty five reserved seats for women in Parliament, you tend to wonder if we still are not treating the women of this country with grave condescension.

When an anomaly in the form of a ministry of women's affairs exists in a country where the constitution guarantees equality of men and women in every sphere of life, you are liable to feel rather perplexed. That ministry is proof of the bad way in which we yet treat our women.

It is not, therefore, only Amini who goes ballistic every time you speak of treating women with respect and with dignity. There are all the others around you. Observe the many instances of so-called fatwa decreed by men with an extremely poor understanding of Islam.

In incidents involving adultery or rape or both, these charlatans have always made sure that it is the victims (in this instance women) and not the perpetrators (and they are all men) who become victims a second time, this time of the fatwa. Who says Mukhtar Mai is something that can happen only in Pakistan? In the villages and towns of Bangladesh, Mukhtar Mais abound . . . because we have progressively let our women down.

There is a curious amalgam of feelings working in our male psychology. Women are and have always been obscure objects of lustful desire in our societal framework. Not many men are there who look upon their women colleagues from a professional point of view. That is disturbing, for there is the bad odour of sexual harassment about it. And do not ignore the stench which comes of an emphasis, even now, on dowry.

To be a woman is to be a symbolism of all that is innately good about life. When you pelt her with obscenities, with black suggestiveness, you assault the moral beauty of your mother … and you run the risk of dehumanising yourself.

The writer is Editor, Current Affairs, The Daily Star. E-mail: bahsantareq@yahoo.co.uk

(source:thedailystar.net)

==================================================